Confiteor

A Novel

N. E.

Ybarra

For Iris Whenever I May Find Her

Past quarter to midnight. I left a rerun of Ed Sullivan chattering in his Sunday suit on
while muted in black and white. The nights guest was the Rolling Stones. The British band earned bad headlines too many with Sympathy for the Devil while Mick Jagger was nabbed by stone-faced uniformed men for drug possession in the background. I stood and walked to a corner and slowly turned off the only two surviving bulbs inside native tower lanterns. I was alone. Then there was darkness. Strange darkness, it was. Either it came as a friend or a thief in the night did not really matter at that hour. Not anymore. I waited for it like an open river thirsting for an eternal embrace with the surging waves. I waited for it because it might deliver some message, some unstamped postcard or a torn bill from a distant past not very well forgiven nor sorely forgotten. Like pain, darkness too was a channel; a path for an encounter between two plains of opposites. Despite the glare of the boob tube, inch by inch the night with its dark creeping wrath tried to swallow everything in the room and what was left inside of me. Like an angel of death on Passover dusk, it crawled and claimed breath after breath. It hovered first upon the gloomy room, and then feasted on my senses. While the former was a wide open square of wicker and twisted bamboo, the latter was a closed torso of rotten, barren, and aging mortal flesh. Except for its drab walls crammed almost entirely by tomes and paperbacks, my private space breathed only of minimalist intentions. Even sergeant darkness could not all too suddenly prevail. A motley gathering of run-of-the-mill furniture with dusty upholstery of what appeared to be thin cowhide took a quarter of it. For other than a handful of framed covers of The Beatles LPs and James Dean, there was no need for much clutter. An old phonograph with a shiny 45 turntable occupied a carpeted nook. On the left, below a counterfeit Monet, a modernist driftwood art curiously baptized as Cinderellas Shoe stood as a sentry to my rest room in the corner. Often it was misread as an eyesore. Sometimes it was perceived as picturesque. A fisherman from a nearby village of Sta. Inez once gave it as an afterthought. Felix was near the end of his fifties when I first met him. He was the father of a public school teacher who left their seaside cottage to marry an old gent without his paternal seal, leaving behind her work and Felix licking his wounded pride. So he turned into collecting driftwood as a new-found hobby until the Shoe came the day after strong monsoon winds almost turned his cottage upside down. The Shoe was his handiwork. It pleased him greatly. He even gave it some reconstructed history. Felix believed that the previous tropical storm Manding signed, sealed, and delivered it straight to his door, to his beach, to his life. And so it was, the old man insisted, guided by the shifting hands of destiny. The Shoe should be housed somewhere near some deity, some sacred patch of hungry, blessed earth. I was skeptical as Hume would have been but I gave Felix the benefit anyway. The old prick deserved it. I agreed I had to give it some refuge. As it was said: it was neither polite to

refuse a seas offering nor chastise a fishermans gift. Felix was a beggar of the salt waters all his waking life in those latter years and I welcomed his tall tales of giant rogue waves and deep sea fishing, and well along found myself intent in grasping his dreamy lectures of the seas mysteries and cryptic enigmas like a child at bedtime. I was, to borrow from Sinatra, bewitched.

Like any man his age, Felix sounded crude for an hour or so. His effortless Tagalog had a
peculiar thickness of those migrating from deep southern seas. The fact that he was conversing with the most schooled chap in the village did not even seem to affect him. Tables were turned, as the clich claimed, at that time. I was sitting there, wind blowing in my ears, listening to a shirtless fifty-something fisherman who finally had a Jesuit as his sole audience trying to appreciate his monologues. And I enjoyed the perks of his turf. The fresh shrimps, especially. But all the while I was heavily saddled with my own paradoxes covered only with a black clerical button down complimenting an old Levis, torn near the knees, and a grubby pair of sneakers. Maybe Felix saw my ironies. Like what he did with sea breeze, maybe he did smell my inconsistencies. He asked of my ever-present past, perchance a storm or two or maybe shipwrecks and pirates, but I only gave him excerpts and more subtitles. I gave him the impression that I had beer and ice and shrimps to enjoy and the afternoon was so good I had no plans of saying my confession. So it was, that between his cups of what smelled as tea of leaves and brown sugar, Felix was essaying about the language of waves and stars, and I was an ignoramus in the court of a seasoned orator of a tour guide. He had the habit too of long pauses while gazing far down at the horizon as if some mischievous siren was beckoning him to follow its dance through patches of fading sunlight. What was that rhythm or what it sounded like was all his to keep. And I knew he kept too many secrets. Felix had secrets. Some were sins, others were scars. After what seemed like four cold bottles and plate after plate of fried shrimps in his windy open porch that Sunday afternoon, I was drowsy and quite ready to sleep. Tea is better for you, Padre. He poured some of his concoction of leaves in a tin cup. I reckon I have to ask your cook to start gather some leaves then soaked them in boiling water with some lemon. You do this every time? I asked. I forced my eyes to stay open and inquiring. Talking to a Jesuit or drinking tea, which one, ha, Padre? Both, I hope. I mused. Every day, yeah, I grew my own garden at the back, near my boats. Felix smiled. I can bring some to your place and your Josefina will take care of things.

Well, I do not meet people like you this much. Hell, yeah. I was baptized like everybody else around here but the sea has been my church for the last twelve years and fishing feels a lot like religion. He continued. I will tell you why after you drink some of my tea! I obliged. The taste was good, so was the afternoon. Felix was delighted at the thought of asking my irreverent cook to persuade me to drink tea and hide all my tonic and gin in the cupboard instead. But Josefina did not know my reserves. I told Felix that I had three sealed cartons of Chivas Regal tucked safely in the closets in the sacristy. I was naughty enough, and I had friends in higher places, pulling strings in the confines of a Duty-Free. I heard his neighbors gossiped and Josefina broadcasted with much rattle and hum days earlier that Felix was a Marine in his other lifetime. It was a lifetime clouded in tragedy. It was a tragedy that defined a lifetime. As to which of these two was more substantial only those severed bodies in bags up the red hills of Basilan knew. And this was something he was not ready to tell people about. I was a young son of St. Ignatius, bespectacled and seemingly juvenile, and was still very wet behind the ears. I was there only for his fresh shrimp, delicious and free, and I surmised Felix needed to have some soul for some good conversation. Though his teeth yellowed and his sunburned skin glistened in the afternoon sun, he still had the look of an inquisitor. He still had the feel of someone crawling on thick reddish mud on all fours while tracer bullets rained from the eyes of nowhere. And perhaps that epoch of his past and that wedge of persona gave birth to his gaze; probing, questioning. After four cups of his strong brew, Felix hurriedly went away to his makeshift kitchen at the rear of his house. He came back and prepared a nylon hammock made out of used fishing nets for me and tied its two ends under some trees. I held his very old homemade guitar, a good mishmash of cheap varnish and plywood. I tried my fingers on the easy chords of a familiar Leonard Cohen melody. When is the funeral for those two girls? Those two girls, right. I think, maybe Friday after lunch. Will you be attending? I will try, he said. Felix was really not much of a church-going type and I bet there was some very mortal reason why. It was not the right time to intrude. It was the time to listen. It happens every year, Father. I dont know why but it sure looks as if some payment has to be done. The sea provides, and it asks for a ransom. This one is not well explained. He grimaced. I am not very religious, ysee. But I do pray a lot. I saw evil in the eye too many times that I want to forget everything. The sea helps a lot, you know. The breeze grew stronger and straight at the acacia leaves above me. There was a lull. Through the open door I could see some framed pictures of women dressed in happier times. How is your daughter? I asked just to keep him going. I was not clear why I did it.

Silence interrupted. A cold and aching interlude, like incense it was. Ah, I heard my wife reading her telegram the other night. I believe I heard about a coming civil wedding three weeks from now. I guess it is the Swiss expat this time. He paused. I miss my daughter, God knows that, but everyone has to be scarred somehow. I mean it, everyone. He stopped. The wind blew over his thinning gray hair. Im sorry. But fathers are fathers, you understand? He looked away. His old eyes seemed to burst. The sea and its expanse were good excuses to deviate from the perils of the heart. People change a good deal. Often they do not meet our best expectations. It doesnt feel good, I know. It is a mystery, like the sea, huh, Felix? He did not seem to hear me. I saw that gaze again. It was like watching those eyes of forgotten prophets, shamans, and alchemists before they were led to the gallows. Time went by fast. It came with every cracking wave, with every spilling of salty froth on the break water. Some brown acacia leaves resigned and surrendered to the beatings of the angry wind. Some of them landed on my reading glasses. I was left alone in the hammock, lying with a full belly and a sleepy head. Felix excused himself and hurriedly went to the mercado beyond the square on his China-made bicycle to buy some kerosene and cooking oil for the night. As I stared at the rising tide of white coattails married in blue, I thought about the two girls who got drowned two days earlier. They were siblings. Their poor father who limped with a crutch was cooking rice and asked them to gather some green shells for lunch when the older one, named Teresa, was trapped unmercifully in waist-deep mud. Her five-year old sister was helplessly trying to pull her out until the rising sea washed them and their bag of green shells away. It was fast, very fast. The wine, dark, open water took their dreams away. If the sea could spit out driftwoods and weeds to the shore, it also wanted to take some away. They were not the first. And only the treacherous sea of blue and its depths knew who might be next. Apart from intoning the funeral incantations in Latin on Friday afternoon, my job was to explain to people the side of God. I had to keep His love sweet victorious while preaching before two coffins and a village of people confused. And this was not glamorous. It made me sick in the gut. And I came to see Felix to pursue the words.

friendship with Felix also marked my affair with driftwood. It was my first December in Sta. Inez. I first met this bald fisherman during a heated council meeting with an angry barangay chairman. It was the season of lights and the old man was given the green signal to design their Nativity Scene to stand as their solid entry to a contest in the nearby town. Felix did his job with so much delight but only to his neighbors burning disappointment. Driftwood

My

was used instead of paper and boards, and the chairman tried to see hard and well but he neither grasped the aesthetics nor the purpose. The people thought it was scandalous and macabre. The politicians thought it was money wasted. And they needed a priest to evaluate as a last resort, and I was glad I heeded their invitation. Like that weary US soldier stumbling upon a room filled with liquor and wine in Hitlers mountain retreat, I was amazed by those old, brown, hued and scarred pieces from the bounty of sea and sand they were rough symbols of pure pilgrim humanity, and they spoke to me in a language they learned from the sea. After all, we were all drifters in this fleeting and continuous flux of space and time. Hegel said that, and all of western thought became a footnote to him. I was turned into driftwood. People are like driftwoods, Padre. You see, these are wandering pieces of reject in the ocean and they only come to us when there is a storm. Somehow they have found a resting place, and they arrive in different shapes and textures. Felix said between his cups of tea. It sounded almost like a monotone. We were in his porch for the first time. A paper lantern hanged near the bamboo steps and the rushing waves nearby offered a soothing rhythm of loss and gain, hello and goodbye. He offered me some of his tea but I preferred water from his coco trees instead. The chairman simply did not get it, but it is alright with me. I have found another believer. He laughed. His wife was busy in the makeshift kitchen preparing the swordfish Felix said he caught early in the morning. They lived alone. Their only daughter was teaching in the city and had no plans of coming home for the holidays. The thing is, the fisherman continued, is that we cannot see its real beauty unless one is attached to another, very much like people, eh, Padre? It is all about relating, Felix. God is in a relationship. Religion is. I did not say further. He was right. I nodded only in agreement. Outside the house some children were singing carols for a few centavos. I let them finished their innocent effort and gave them a twenty peso bill. Like those children, like my mind, everyone, and everything is drifting in a sea of reality. I thought about the Holy Family back in that very first Christmas day. Joseph and Mary, heavy with child, were drifting from one village to another. They were wanderers. Christ too was itinerant. Then they found a resting place to bear the Messiah. And Jesus birth was in a different texture and shape apart from our anticipations. Felix was right. Maybe the sea taught him a lot. Maybe fishing was the best science in the world. It was dusk. The Angelus was intoned by distant church bells. I would be walking home in an hour. Felix would not let me go without a bite. I was sitting on his rocking chair, listening to the waves while my eyes held that line where the open sea met the sky. It was idyllic. It was like watching a piece of infinity flirting with our finitude. Farther down Sta. Inezs shore some fishermen were fixing their nets and buoys while dogs and children played chase on the sand so white it challenged the orange haze of the retiring sun. Those children seemed to own the world

while their mothers owned only their clotheslines; their skirts and washed laundry dancing in the breeze. I held my gaze for awhile while trying to take them all in my head, and wondered what kind of a drifting wood was I, or whether or not had I really found my real and final resting place in the bosoms of Sta. Inez.

II

In the room, another flat drifter cradled my six-year old TV set, diverting ones attention
from those wide walls of brick and French windows of cracked white paint while a hand-medown refrigerator hummed alone on a corner. Near the sagging bookshelves of classics and hardto-find Hemingway and Madrid covers was my old acrylic painting of a woman with a wildflower on her hair standing beside a white sedan parked near a rundown fence of what was a chicken farm. She once had a name. And she once walked into my youth, and left when her dreams called her away, very far away from mine. I always said goodnight to her after I recited the Breviary, and funny that for the last fifteen years I heard no response. I tried to burn the canvass even the easel long time ago but never found the timeor even the courage. The digital clock on my study table said it was one oclock dawn. I walked back to the couch and searched for my favorite pillows. I had to take some sleep for an early trip to the district hospital in the morning. It would only take me two hours in my old Beetle without the usual traffic stops at Zamora Avenue and the crowded university belt. Students riding on scooters with their girlfriends in torn Levis, piercings, and oversized shades were a common sight at UP-LB. Well, it was the summer of 1973, and Martial Law became both as a faade for the rich to go notorious and as an excuse for the poor wannabes to shout at Mendiola Bridge. I did not have to wear my collar when I attended my classes but I could not bring myself to wear leather jackets and smelly pair of denims. But the trip to the hospital the next day would be official clerical business, and I needed the perks of the Roman garb. Then the phone rang. I shuddered as if my spine was buried in a kilo of ice. It rang twice. It stopped. Again, and again it disturbed the stillness of my room. Beads of sweat ran down my face to my neck and I only stared at the ceiling as if I saw clouds. I did not have to answer it. It was the midnight message I was waiting for. I somehow hoped it would end after Jenny died but it did not. I just stared at the phone, and wondered why this time the message arrived past the unholy hour of twelve. A loud crash was heard from outside the main doors. It seemed as if some being jumped from the second-storey gutter then headed straight into solid concrete, breaking the clay flower pots.

I stood and grabbed my trusted flashlight. I had to see something. Without hesitation I opened my curtains and saw the fire two blocks from the rectory. Dark clouds of smoke rose from the electric poles and into the darker sky. The public market was on fire.

The Andres Del Rosario Memorial Hospital was a 1950s architecture gone unfinished by
bad politics and common sense. In the outside, it looked as though some space shuttle was about to be launched to space because of its protruding beams and steel nerves aiming at the dark and smog of urban sky. Inside were whitewashed walls that smelled of cheap antiseptic and unwashed filth of human degeneration. With a budget so small it could only run a modest pharmacy and pay a staff of about thirty heads, I wondered if the heirs of Andres Del Rosario never had to quarrel among their kin. I also wondered whether or not the deceased Del Rosario was still contented to lend his good name to the aging building. The mortician, an old Marxist chap in horn-rimmed glasses, granted my request to see the body before his team of bored embalmers would do their job with it. No, we dont welcome non-family members, and I do not care who you are. He blurted over the phone. But I insisted. I told him of my on-going doctoral research with UP-Los Baos on postmortem conditions of demonic possession cases. Without it I would not be graduating in the summer, and the bishop was not too happy about the thought. I needed to see Jenny before the autopsy. I needed to see what those visitors did to her, physically. Look, sir, I will only be there for fifteen minutes, and I promise there will be no pictures. I just need to check on something, if you please OK, but I dont want bad press for this, understand me? He finally gave in. Sure, whatever you say. Thank you And, by the way, I am not Catholic!

III
This hollowed space called rectory used to be a party hub in its heyday. It used to be. This was named before as the Moreno house of pain according to urban legend, for whatever reason not known to me in my early days as parish priest. Josefina, a fat woman of sixty-four and was already cooking for people like me in the last twenty years, told me its tall tale one time during breakfast. Some forty years ago, she said as she washed some plates in the sink, the diocese did not have enough funds to build a respectable rectory for the coming Jesuits. The

Society of Jesus was called only as reinforcement, sometime ago, as secular clerics were so few they could not carry the workload and pastoral work especially with the increasing Aglipayan population. A new convent would have been a welcome replacement after the first one got burned right after World War II. It turned out, as history unfolded between Josefinas sink and stove, that when the venerable Italians came, a certain Mr. Douglas Moreno, the fast-living owner of this antebellum house, was very proud to narrate to everyone with an ear about his Sicilian roots. Somehow he wanted connection or maybe he was about to beg some favors. This well-dressed man lived alone except for his beloved Rolls-Royce and a stable of wild women. Moreno was a baptized Catholic but he never attended church despite the proximity of his two-storey abode to the parish grounds. In the aftermath, maybe he followed what Alfred Nobel did after his fortune from dynamite or was it pure remorse or another attempt of unsaid bribery, the notorious mestizo ended donating his expensive property after more than a month to the grateful Jesuits. They said that he had lung cancer, and he finally needed the sacraments. Padre, do not be surprised when you hear voices in the attic. She said. Her weight shifted with her every slice of potato. And why would I be, Sefin? I caught myself very amused with the very worried look in her old eyes. The old Jesuits did not give Mr. Moreno extreme unction after he signed the donation, huh? That is what I am very scared about, Padre. You know, those from the other world have their way of forcing us to keep our promises. Is that right? You tell me. You are the priest, and I am your cook! That is a good thought. I said. And before we worry about the business in the other world, Josefina, you can hurry with your cooking because I am starving. Starvation leads to death, we both know that. If I die because of your cooking, I tell you I will not let you an hour of sleep. I wrote the first draft of my graduate thesis on a worn word processor near the window sill, and in my first week as assistant pastor had my most painful hangover in the couch. It was here when I saw Woodstock 69 for the nth time, and wondered if I could play guitar like Jimi Hendrix. There were binges. Those birthdays and anniversaries, they all happened here. There was only one funeral. And it was almost mine. The house was telling its story. The windows too were closed, and long curtains of ocean blue were drawn to the tiled floor. The whole place no longer smelled of neglect and pain. And it was all I needed for the moment. Some quiet. Perhaps some moments of stillness to mend some broken pieces inside me could do its miracle.

I was tired. I was very alone. My hunger was no longer, it seemed, there after I ate a peanut butter sandwich and two cans of diet soda. I stood and with that last of half-empty bottle of water I opened the front door and sat quietly on the steps. I took off my old Jordans and socks and sat there and tried to train my vision on the images on the lawn. There were those old mango trees. I saw the lines of the grotto on the other end with the forgotten statue of the Blessed Virgin with its vases in need of flowers. The outside of the rectory though was not very dark and a streetlight stood majestic at a corner facing Zamora and Gomez streets. It was late October and the cold Siberian wind should have been blowing this way but it did not come. Then a cold mist surrounded me like a slow migration of ghosts. Little drops of rain could be heard as little needles of steel piercing through the tin roof above me. Then I remembered Jenny. I recalled that it was the first time I saw her before they tied her thin wrists to a bedpost. Blood was all over the sheets. Hey, Father, can I borrow some holy water? She asked with her wicked smile. As a fourteen-year old girl for sure she did have any idea what she was asking from me. I did not mind her at first. I continued with my meal of rice and squash until she tugged at my clerical shirt, insisting, as if she found a gold mine in my living room. I had to look at her in the eyes, and I saw the joy she thought she found. She was in that same living room holding a still mint vinyl copy of Rubber Soul. The album was dear to me. I looked quizzically at her aunt sitting nervously on the sofa. I tried to tell Susan to please return the canister someday in secret, without saying a word. She understood. You see, Jen, its priceless but uhalright. Promise me you will not open it. Thanks, Father. She said. I will return this after a couple of weeks. Without a scratch, she added. Please do, I replied with my eyes silently gazing at the window. Outside, along the biggest branch of the mango tree I could see Yoko, the pet monkey of Father Jim, inside his wire pen. The beast was panting and rocking his house as if a storm was coming. Even old Yoko had a haunch of what was soon to come. I understood.

II

After the last important speech of the night was delivered in the crowded refectory, we
hurriedly went back to our dinner of chicken ribs and into our usual chatter about a litany of youths trivialities. We did not even really remember exactly the details of that speech. It seemed important, yeah, but it was the mid-1960s, and some things were not meant to be taken too seriously. It was college, and we were having a joyride with our hormones, paperbacks, and

cassette tapes. It was college in a Catholic seminary at that, and we were very young as to really trouble ourselves with academic discussions of the latest encyclical of John XXIII or what the good German, Heidegger, really meant with his Dasein. After all, Father Rectors real concern was only about the schedule for the night and the whos who for this and that. And Dr. J finally made it again for the fourth time in the NBA playoffs. Life was good. It was a happy hour. The evening meal turned out to be longer than usual as surplus food from our back kitchen made its way to our tables. We rearranged our tables, alright, so as to include more heads in the conversation. It meant only two things for us then: either the old Ms. Consuelo truly loved us or she expected us to wash the plates instead. Scavengers! She would scream at us like a rabid dog. Dishwashing, as the legendary joke would claim, was a major elective subject for seminarians, and it was far more important and sacred than Church Latin. In her own right, Ms. Consuelo too would be the first cook to be beatified if ever one of us would unfortunately make it to the Vatican. The Siberian wind started to come in tiny packets for it was the middle of October and everyone thought of Idang to hit Manila anytime that night. Downtown roads were on a gridlock and the rush hour appeared like Fr. Bens assignment in Calculus: it would make or break someones level of sheer tolerance. In the outskirts of our heads, we could smell already the clogged ditches of Malabon; we could hear the foot traffic at Quiapo. Umbrellas and raincoats were already neatly placed at the seminary lobby just in case. But there was not even a drizzle. Maybe it forgot its official route. Maybe it played hide and seek with PAGASA. And we did not worry a bit about any typhoon at all. We were overflowing with boyish excitement instead for that night was sort of special for everyone as piled bones of chicken ribs and dirty glasses of soda in the giant stainless sink at the back hall would testify. After all, we were very youngand youth seemed to last forever. We were wrong. I was wrong. Then I met the stench for the first time in the dorm. The hair on my nape stood, and suddenly youth escaped from my grasp.